I don't see whay Debian has an advantage over RedHat here. I have been using autorpm to perform automatic updates in exactly the fashion you describe on RedHat systems that I administer.
There was a press release from Turbolinux claiming this. On closer examination it was over a brief period of time immediately following a major new release of Turbolinux. Even then there was some doubt as to the validity of the claims.
And astrologists have been studying the nature of astral body movements for a long time, and have developed quite comprehensive quantitative models. Argument from authority.
No, not argument from authority. You asked me for substantiation of my claims of quantitative models and I provided them. You are changing the question. Your original claim was:
there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened
I provided direct evidence of such studies. Done by people who have a lot better empirical track record than do either astrologers or Marxist economicists.
The unstated assumption here is that these countries would be worse off in the long run if other countries didn't invest in them. Can you substantiate that?
Sure. But why should I? You have declined to provide any substantiation of your position. When I provide substantiation you change the question.
I like the concept a lot. I would rather have any Linux distro than the AOL CD that comes with my Sunday newspaper anytime.
I just hope that it is a well done distro. I'd reather see something conservative but reliable than some of these cutting edge distros that have a lot of rough edges.
Now all we need is RedHat + SuperMicro, SuSe + ABit, etc.
Maybe that's what the new RedHat non-profit should be doing? Stuffing the Sunday newspaper with cheap Linux CD's?
Everything they do is mandated by an obligation to increase thier stock price (via the omnipresesnt threat of shareholder lawsuits, which is very real).
Plenty of publically traded corporations engage in activities that do not directly come back as share price increases. Look at all the corporate funding of public TV, or the common practice of companies matching employee contributions to charity, or the long standing practice of support by corporations for the United Way.
And, for gods sake, there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened
Economicists have been studying the impact of capital flows of this nature for a long time, and have developed quite comprehensive quantitative models. If you want to examine some discussion of this, take a look at some course syllabi and accompanying references like: http://ricardo.econ.bbk.ac.uk/mscecon/mscgrowth.ht ml
And why do you drag Marxism into this, anyway?
The theory that western wealth is due to third world exploitation was originally proposed by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. It is classical Marxist economic theory. It behooves you to understand the origins of the ideas you propose.
multinational corporation with factories in the third world, what are their expenditures in each third world country, how much they make out of selling the resultant products, and where does that money end up.
You neglect to consider the transfer of wages and capital that would have gone to first world workers that now go to third world workers. Usually this far outweighs the profits of the multinational companies. Not to mention the the educational infrastructure investments that often accompany such investments. This is why governments of third world countries strive to attract foriegn investment. Investments of this nature have done a lot to improve the economies of developing nations.
I'm not about to accept unsubstantiated claims from your part here.
There are 10 quality references in the link above. Now let me see your substantiation.
First of all, the wealth of the "first-world" nations is based on centuries of economic exploitation of the third world.
Nonsense. All econometric studies of this idea have failed miserably to show that anywhere close to enough wealth has been transferred from third world countries to account for first world economic growth.
This 'theory' is just of of many Marxist economic postulates that in fact have been totally discredited by real quantitative study of what actually happened.
The simple fact of the matter is that there has NEVER been a single succesful implementation of Marxist economic theory. Nations that have tried it have ended up regressing economically, and in many cases have had large numbers of their citzens die of starvation.
The main reason not to use Linux is that your company IS department is cramming Windows down your throat and your only choice is to not use a computer at all. Side reasons are specialized applications like SAS JMP or lack of drivers for hardware like ComputerBoards A/D stuff and Camille. I don't think your other reasons are very persuasive.
CORBA, according to a lot of surveys is more widely used than COM. RAD in the form of Py/Tk/C is very slick, and there still isn't an editor anywhere that can do what Emacs can. Central registries are interesting in theory but the fact is that in real life they get corrupted by poorly written software leading to the help desk advising people "reinstall to fix any bugs you may have" or a system upgrade resulting in having to reinstall all applications as well. To me a the central registry in Windows leads to massive long term system instability and is one of the best reasons to run Linux.
As far as GUIs crashing, I have far more Windows Explorer crashes than I ever get from XFree.
Microsoft IE 5 is the best web browser currently available. But it also is a bloated pig in terms of system resources and does not fully adhere to standards, and I'd bet in the not too distant future will be surpassed by Mozilla. In the meantime Netscape is quite 'decent' thank you.
AP - Today 4 lawyers working for the team that recently won a $1 billion dollar settlement from Toshiba for a twelve year old floppy drive firmware bug instigated a class action suit against slasdot.org for continually presenting web pages with false or erroneous information. Said one user 'like half the time I can't log in or the list of comments is incomplete or the cookies are wrong or who knows what". Also being asked to join the suit are operators of web sites that have experienced the debilitating effects of being slashdotted - that is having page requests increase six orders of magnitude after having an article referring to their site posted on slashdot.org.
Said one webmaster who asked to remain anonymous "being slashdotted is just another form of a distributed DoS attack. Somebody should report these guys to the FBI. They should know that memory leaks in Microsoft IIS and Win NT 4.0 will cause gross instabilities under these kinds of loads".
Damage amounts in the filing have not been set yet, but informally members of the litigation team say they expect damages in the 11 figure ballpark.
Not always - there were a few episodes of Star Trek that were really good - but those of course were written by people like Harlan Ellison and Ted Sturgeon.
Outer Limits though was the clear quill. I love throwing 'Demon With a Glass Hand' on my LD player.
Uh-oh. Betch he's a Red Lectroid from Planet 10, just like the rest of those guys from Yoyodyne Propulsion. John Yaya, John Smallberries, John Bigboote.
They all landed in Grover's Mill NJ on Halloween in 1939 you know. The landing was covered up by Orson Wells in his war of the worlds broadcast. And we are getting pretty near Halloween again!
Linux (or any Unix variant) is not suitable for the consumer market. Probably never will be.
What of Mac OS X then?
the most elegant C++ API
Personally I think C++ is a load of bull. One of these days people will wake up to the fact that C++ is a pile of cruft grafted onto something that should have been left alone because it was nearly perfect.
If IDG doesn't go after this sort of use of their trademarked phrase, they indeed do risk the loss of their trademark. Plenty of comapnies rue the day when they lose such important brand identification.
Yes, I ran into this recently when purchasing a laptop. I was able to find a dealer (Hitron in Silicon Valley) that was willing to sell me a nice Chembook laptop without an operating system. They had to laod windows on it for burn in, but then just wiped the hard disk after burn in.
All in all things worked out very well. I got myself a *very* nice laptop without having to pay for an OS that I didn't want.
Maybe this trend will result in being able to purchase laptops from Dell etc. without Windows.
The French are great at coming up with ideas that at some level seem quite logical, yet at the end, when it is all well and done the result is chaos.
The key phrase in the proposal is:
The objective of this forum is to collect suggestions, these will all be analyzed and weighed, in particular by the sponsor in charge of proposing the law.
This indicates that the idea is doomed from the start. Firstly all that is being proposed is collection and analysis of suggestions. Looks fine to an American, no? Let me tell you, with the French this could take centuries. The French have a tendency to analyze the shit out of everything before taking a move. Time in France is a very relative concept, and coupled with a fear of being wrong leads to analysis paralysis as a way of life.
Not only is this trap obvious here, but the speaker is proposing that somebody else actually do the work! Well, I can tell you from my experience with the French that this is bloody unlikely! French organizations embody the very essence of siloing. Unless there is some damned good reason for this other fellow to do the work, it just is not going to happen, a) just because this other fellow suggested it, and b) NIH c) my boss didn't like it. d) even if my boss did like it he didn't think of it e) we are on strike this week f) it's August so everyone in in the Alps.
If you ever plan to visit France it is very important to understand System D; that is how to weasel and worm out of French Bureaucrats the basic paperwork you need to live. And the French Buraucracy has been in place essentially unchanged since the time of Napolean! The very word Buraucracy was invented by the French to describe their system of goverment. It literaly mean tyranny of the desks!!!!
As far as I can tell such a speach may in fact be a clever ploy by Microsoft to prevent Open Source from ever gaining a foothold in France!
Of course the good news is that the Germans will take a look at the French and do exactly the opposite. My guess is by the end of next year all of Germany will be run on Open Source, and Microsoft will be more entrenched in France than ever!!!
Don't tell me the US is the most open trade economy. It's not. It, like *every* other trade economy has, as a primary motivator, self-interest.
I am certainly going to tell you this, because it is the fact. Anecdotal evidence regarding lamb or any other single commodity does not provide proof otherwise. As a counter example, look at the awful shellacking the US is taking in it's steel industry due to dumping at below cost prices by Far Eastern nations. The US was the inventor of the TV and the VCR. Are VCRs made in the US? Not any more. Ditto TV tubes. What other nation would allow something like steel to be eviscerated in this manner?
Perhaps it is motivated by self-interest. That doesn't change the fact that it is the most open in the world. A lot of economicists in the US believe that an open trade policy despite the economic dislocations that result is in fact good overall because it results in an economic system that must be competitive on a global basis. The economic growth that the US has enjoyed for the past 9 years is a strong argument in favor of that viewpoint.
What really frosts my butt is reading a viewpoint from, say, the Economicist, based in England where the costs of goods paid by citizens are much higher due to outmoded economic models, that the US is insular. Utter and complete rubbish.
The Economist has a predictably European slant on the US that is in fact often badly mistaken. The topic for this issue is a clear illustration of that fact.
For example, in the articles associated with the cover it complains that the US may be heading towards much more protectionist trade policies. This completely neglects the FACT that the US has by far the most open trade policies of any nation in the world today. If you do not believe me, compare the cost of non-domestic goods in the US vs. any European nation. If Europe or Asia as a whole, or any one nation were running anything like the per capita trade deficit the US runs, THERE WOULD BE RIOTS IN THE STREETS IN TOKYO, SOEUL, PARIS, ROME, BERLIN, STOKHOLM and LONDON BY THEIR UNIONS. The Economist is so far off base in this assesment of US trade policy that it has in fact no credibility. It is whining about a perceived possible shift in US attitude towards trade that is in fact far more open than the attitude in Europe.
The second article complains vigourously about the US rejection of the test ban treaty. There is some justification of these complaints, however there is a strong case to be made that this treaty does not in fact address the matter of nuclear proliferation whatsoever. The only signatories to the treaty were countries in fact that had no need to conduct nuclear tests - either they have entrenched capability, or they have no programs for the development of nuclear arms. No nations with aspirations of developing or in the process of developing weapons were in fact signatories to this treaty. If in fact this treaty did actually amount to anything substantial I am sure that there would have been enough votes to at least delay consideration of the issue, and probably approve it. The concept that the US is in fact withdrawing in some fashion from international affairs is nonsense. In fact it is the US that is spending far too many of it's tax dollars in military readiness IN ORDER TO ASSUME DEFENSE BURDENS THAT THE EUROPEANS SHOULD BE MANAGING THEMSELVES. Why in fact should the US have to assume such a large part of the burden in Bosnia and Kosovo? Is this not internal to Europe? Why do we need large military bases in Europe in this post USSR era? IT'S BECAUSE THE EUROPEANS HAVE BEEN NEGLECTING TO MANAGE THEIR OWN FORIEGN AFFAIRS AND DEFENSE, not because the US is behaving in a isolationist manner.
Dammit, without the US founding NATO and institution of the Marshall Plan after the end of WWII, I'd bet that most of WESTERN Europe would be in the sad state that Eastern Europe is still in today.
These complaints about the US being insular quickly shrivel up once you hold up the complaints to the light of the facts. They are Myth, as any real student of history and world politics soon realizes.
Think fast: in nine or ten years, more chinese will be online than us citizens are alive.
I think that the makeup of ICANN needs to be strongly international despite the current demographics of internet use.
Having said that, China's problems with literacy rates and lack of infrastructure are not going to be solved in 9-10 years. The percentage of Chinese that finish 1st grade is lower than the percentage of US citizens that get advanced degrees. Less than 5% of the Chinese polulation has ever made a telephone call. The rate of electrification is low. Even lower is the rate of PC ownership. We are talking about a society where the purchase of a personal computer represents two years income for a large fraction of the population. It is going to take China a lot longer than 9-10 years to wire and educate their masses to the point where they surpass the US in internet usage.
Hmm.. he's a lawyer.. his wife's a lawyer... most of his friends are lawyers... I wonder if there's a connection?
I hate to clue you in like this, but the fact is that 90+% of elected officials in the US are lawyers. It is not unique to the Clintons. Putting lawyers in charge of making the laws is like giving Doctors the power to make diseases. Republican or Democrat, there is no difference in this regard.
Huey Long gave a wonderful speech in the 30's where he describe the difference between the two political parties as two mule skinners working to skin the mule. One starts at the head and works down, the other starts at the feet and works up.
As a former and very insightful boss of mine once noted, the legal profession of the US has become an industry in it's own right. It is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating all on it's own. There is nothing that you or I can do to combat this without radically changing our society.
I think that the law prevents you from trademarking something that is aready in use, much like the case with the idiot who tried to trademark Linux.
Still, you are in better shape if you go the official route. There are trademark web sites that you can use to search for existing trademarks, and get information on how to register your own trademerk.
I'm glad to hear that it turned out this way. It's unfortunate that the initial splash of scandal gets widely publicized, but the resolution that the scandal was in fact libel never seems to get the same level of publicity.
I've long been an admirer of Sir Arthur's writings, especially the hilarious Tales from the White Hart, and the marvelous Childhood's End. Neither receive the publicity of his later 2001 and Rama related work, but in my opinion are far more interesting.
He was knighted after all? I thought that the flap over charges that he is a paedophile caused the British to withdraw the offer of knighthood. Does anyone have the story on this?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see whay Debian has an advantage over RedHat here. I have been using autorpm to perform automatic updates in exactly the fashion you describe on RedHat systems that I administer.
Expletive Deleted. After waiting 6 months for driver support, I went out and ordered a Hoontech 4DWave card.
NOW they announce drivers for Linux!!!
There was a press release from Turbolinux claiming this. On closer examination it was over a brief period of time immediately following a major new release of Turbolinux. Even then there was some doubt as to the validity of the claims.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us.
And astrologists have been studying the nature of astral body movements for a long time, and have developed quite comprehensive quantitative models. Argument from authority.
No, not argument from authority. You asked me for substantiation of my claims of quantitative models and I provided them. You are changing the question. Your original claim was:
there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened
I provided direct evidence of such studies. Done by people who have a lot better empirical track record than do either astrologers or Marxist economicists.
The unstated assumption here is that these countries would be worse off in the long run if other countries didn't invest in them. Can you
substantiate that?
Sure. But why should I? You have declined to provide any substantiation of your position. When I provide substantiation you change the question.
Put up or shut up.
I like the concept a lot. I would rather have any Linux distro than the AOL CD that comes with my Sunday newspaper anytime.
I just hope that it is a well done distro. I'd reather see something conservative but reliable than some of these cutting edge distros that have a lot of rough edges.
Now all we need is RedHat + SuperMicro, SuSe + ABit, etc.
Maybe that's what the new RedHat non-profit should be doing? Stuffing the Sunday newspaper with cheap Linux CD's?
Everything they do is mandated by an obligation to increase thier stock price (via the omnipresesnt threat of shareholder lawsuits, which is very real).
Plenty of publically traded corporations engage in activities that do not directly come back as share price increases. Look at all the corporate funding of public TV, or the common practice of companies matching employee contributions to charity, or the long standing practice of support by corporations for the United Way.
And, for gods sake, there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened
t ml
Economicists have been studying the impact of capital flows of this nature for a long time, and have developed quite comprehensive quantitative models. If you want to examine some discussion of this, take a look at some course syllabi and accompanying references like:
http://ricardo.econ.bbk.ac.uk/mscecon/mscgrowth.h
And why do you drag Marxism into this, anyway?
The theory that western wealth is due to third world exploitation was originally proposed by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. It is classical Marxist economic theory. It behooves you to understand the origins of the ideas you propose.
multinational corporation with factories in the third world, what are their expenditures in each third world country, how much they make out of selling the resultant products, and where does that money end up.
You neglect to consider the transfer of wages and capital that would have gone to first world workers that now go to third world workers. Usually this far outweighs the profits of the multinational companies. Not to mention the the educational infrastructure investments that often accompany such investments. This is why governments of third world countries strive to attract foriegn investment. Investments of this nature have done a lot to improve the economies of developing nations.
I'm not about to accept unsubstantiated claims from your part here.
There are 10 quality references in the link above. Now let me see your substantiation.
First of all, the wealth of the "first-world" nations is based on centuries of economic exploitation of the third world.
Nonsense. All econometric studies of this idea have failed miserably to show that anywhere close to enough wealth has been transferred from third world countries to account for first world economic growth.
This 'theory' is just of of many Marxist economic postulates that in fact have been totally discredited by real quantitative study of what actually happened.
The simple fact of the matter is that there has NEVER been a single succesful implementation of Marxist economic theory. Nations that have tried it have ended up regressing economically, and in many cases have had large numbers of their citzens die of starvation.
Marxism is discredited and dead. Long may it rot.
The main reason not to use Linux is that your company IS department is cramming Windows down your throat and your only choice is to not use a computer at all. Side reasons are specialized applications like SAS JMP or lack of drivers for hardware like ComputerBoards A/D stuff and Camille. I don't think your other reasons are very persuasive.
CORBA, according to a lot of surveys is more widely used than COM. RAD in the form of Py/Tk/C is very slick, and there still isn't an editor anywhere that can do what Emacs can. Central registries are interesting in theory but the fact is that in real life they get corrupted by poorly written software leading to the help desk advising people "reinstall to fix any bugs you may have" or a system upgrade resulting in having to reinstall all applications as well. To me a the central registry in Windows leads to massive long term system instability and is one of the best reasons to run Linux.
As far as GUIs crashing, I have far more Windows Explorer crashes than I ever get from XFree.
Microsoft IE 5 is the best web browser currently available. But it also is a bloated pig in terms of system resources and does not fully adhere to standards, and I'd bet in the not too distant future will be surpassed by Mozilla. In the meantime Netscape is quite 'decent' thank you.
The memories of actually having a Hercules graphics card - I feel like I'm in middle school again.
I have a Herc Riva TNT that I like a lot. I was concerned about getting DirectX driver updates - Hercules has some of the better TNT drivers.
Glad to hear it.
AP - Today 4 lawyers working for the team that recently won a $1 billion dollar settlement from Toshiba for a twelve year old floppy drive firmware bug instigated a class action suit against slasdot.org for continually presenting web pages with false or erroneous information. Said one user 'like half the time I can't log in or the list of comments is incomplete or the cookies are wrong or who knows what". Also being asked to join the suit are operators of web sites that have experienced the debilitating effects of being slashdotted - that is having page requests increase six orders of magnitude after having an article referring to their site posted on slashdot.org.
Said one webmaster who asked to remain anonymous "being slashdotted is just another form of a distributed DoS attack. Somebody should report these guys to the FBI. They should know that memory leaks in Microsoft IIS and Win NT 4.0 will cause gross instabilities under these kinds of loads".
Damage amounts in the filing have not been set yet, but informally members of the litigation team say they expect damages in the 11 figure ballpark.
---- 30 -----
Not always - there were a few episodes of Star Trek that were really good - but those of course were written by people like Harlan Ellison and Ted Sturgeon.
Outer Limits though was the clear quill. I love throwing 'Demon With a Glass Hand' on my LD player.
I hope Harlan is working on something......
John Yoon you say?
Uh-oh. Betch he's a Red Lectroid from Planet 10, just like the rest of those guys from Yoyodyne Propulsion. John Yaya, John Smallberries, John Bigboote.
They all landed in Grover's Mill NJ on Halloween in 1939 you know. The landing was covered up by Orson Wells in his war of the worlds broadcast. And we are getting pretty near Halloween again!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!
Linux (or any Unix variant) is not suitable for the consumer market. Probably never will be.
What of Mac OS X then?
the most elegant C++ API
Personally I think C++ is a load of bull. One of these days people will wake up to the fact that C++ is a pile of cruft grafted onto something that should have been left alone because it was nearly perfect.
If IDG doesn't go after this sort of use of their trademarked phrase, they indeed do risk the loss of their trademark. Plenty of comapnies rue the day when they lose such important brand identification.
I don't see what the fuss is about.
Yes, I ran into this recently when purchasing a laptop. I was able to find a dealer (Hitron in Silicon Valley) that was willing to sell me a nice Chembook laptop without an operating system. They had to laod windows on it for burn in, but then just wiped the hard disk after burn in.
All in all things worked out very well. I got myself a *very* nice laptop without having to pay for an OS that I didn't want.
Maybe this trend will result in being able to purchase laptops from Dell etc. without Windows.
The French are great at coming up with ideas that at some level seem quite logical, yet at the end, when it is all well and done the result is chaos.
The key phrase in the proposal is:
The objective of this forum is to collect suggestions, these will all be analyzed and weighed, in particular by the sponsor in charge of proposing the law.
This indicates that the idea is doomed from the start. Firstly all that is being proposed is collection and analysis of suggestions. Looks fine to an American, no? Let me tell you, with the French this could take centuries. The French have a tendency to analyze the shit out of everything before taking a move. Time in France is a very relative concept, and coupled with a fear of being wrong leads to analysis paralysis as a way of life.
Not only is this trap obvious here, but the speaker is proposing that somebody else actually do the work! Well, I can tell you from my experience with the French that this is bloody unlikely! French organizations embody the very essence of siloing. Unless there is some damned good reason for this other fellow to do the work, it just is not going to happen, a) just because this other fellow suggested it, and b) NIH c) my boss didn't like it. d) even if my boss did like it he didn't think of it e) we are on strike this week f) it's August so everyone in in the Alps.
If you ever plan to visit France it is very important to understand System D; that is how to weasel and worm out of French Bureaucrats the basic paperwork you need to live. And the French Buraucracy has been in place essentially unchanged since the time of Napolean! The very word Buraucracy was invented by the French to describe their system of goverment. It literaly mean tyranny of the desks!!!!
As far as I can tell such a speach may in fact be a clever ploy by Microsoft to prevent Open Source from ever gaining a foothold in France!
Of course the good news is that the Germans will take a look at the French and do exactly the opposite. My guess is by the end of next year all of Germany will be run on Open Source, and Microsoft will be more entrenched in France than ever!!!
Don't tell me the US is the most open trade economy. It's not. It, like *every* other trade economy has, as a primary motivator, self-interest.
I am certainly going to tell you this, because it is the fact. Anecdotal evidence regarding lamb or any other single commodity does not provide proof otherwise. As a counter example, look at the awful shellacking the US is taking in it's steel industry due to dumping at below cost prices by Far Eastern nations. The US was the inventor of the TV and the VCR. Are VCRs made in the US? Not any more. Ditto TV tubes. What other nation would allow something like steel to be eviscerated in this manner?
Perhaps it is motivated by self-interest. That doesn't change the fact that it is the most open in the world. A lot of economicists in the US believe that an open trade policy despite the economic dislocations that result is in fact good overall because it results in an economic system that must be competitive on a global basis. The economic growth that the US has enjoyed for the past 9 years is a strong argument in favor of that viewpoint.
What really frosts my butt is reading a viewpoint from, say, the Economicist, based in England where the costs of goods paid by citizens are much higher due to outmoded economic models, that the US is insular. Utter and complete rubbish.
The Economist has a predictably European slant on the US that is in fact often badly mistaken. The topic for this issue is a clear illustration of that fact.
For example, in the articles associated with the cover it complains that the US may be heading towards much more protectionist trade policies. This completely neglects the FACT that the US has by far the most open trade policies of any nation in the world today. If you do not believe me, compare the cost of non-domestic goods in the US vs. any European nation. If Europe or Asia as a whole, or any one nation were running anything like the per capita trade deficit the US runs, THERE WOULD BE RIOTS IN THE STREETS IN TOKYO, SOEUL, PARIS, ROME, BERLIN, STOKHOLM and LONDON BY THEIR UNIONS. The Economist is so far off base in this assesment of US trade policy that it has in fact no credibility. It is whining about a perceived possible shift in US attitude towards trade that is in fact far more open than the attitude in Europe.
The second article complains vigourously about the US rejection of the test ban treaty. There is some justification of these complaints, however there is a strong case to be made that this treaty does not in fact address the matter of nuclear proliferation whatsoever. The only signatories to the treaty were countries in fact that had no need to conduct nuclear tests - either they have entrenched capability, or they have no programs for the development of nuclear arms. No nations with aspirations of developing or in the process of developing weapons were in fact signatories to this treaty. If in fact this treaty did actually amount to anything substantial I am sure that there would have been enough votes to at least delay consideration of the issue, and probably approve it. The concept that the US is in fact withdrawing in some fashion from international affairs is nonsense. In fact it is the US that is spending far too many of it's tax dollars in military readiness IN ORDER TO ASSUME DEFENSE BURDENS THAT THE EUROPEANS SHOULD BE MANAGING THEMSELVES. Why in fact should the US have to assume such a large part of the burden in Bosnia and Kosovo? Is this not internal to Europe? Why do we need large military bases in Europe in this post USSR era? IT'S BECAUSE THE EUROPEANS HAVE BEEN NEGLECTING TO MANAGE THEIR OWN FORIEGN AFFAIRS AND DEFENSE, not because the US is behaving in a isolationist manner.
Dammit, without the US founding NATO and institution of the Marshall Plan after the end of WWII, I'd bet that most of WESTERN Europe would be in the sad state that Eastern Europe is still in today.
These complaints about the US being insular quickly shrivel up once you hold up the complaints to the light of the facts. They are Myth, as any real student of history and world politics soon realizes.
Think fast: in nine or ten years, more chinese will be online than us citizens are alive.
I think that the makeup of ICANN needs to be strongly international despite the current demographics of internet use.
Having said that, China's problems with literacy rates and lack of infrastructure are not going to be solved in 9-10 years. The percentage of Chinese that finish 1st grade is lower than the percentage of US citizens that get advanced degrees. Less than 5% of the Chinese polulation has ever made a telephone call. The rate of electrification is low. Even lower is the rate of PC ownership. We are talking about a society where the purchase of a personal computer represents two years income for a large fraction of the population. It is going to take China a lot longer than 9-10 years to wire and educate their masses to the point where they surpass the US in internet usage.
Hmm.. he's a lawyer.. his wife's a lawyer... most of his friends are lawyers... I wonder if there's a connection?
I hate to clue you in like this, but the fact is that 90+% of elected officials in the US are lawyers. It is not unique to the Clintons. Putting lawyers in charge of making the laws is like giving Doctors the power to make diseases. Republican or Democrat, there is no difference in this regard.
Huey Long gave a wonderful speech in the 30's where he describe the difference between the two political parties as two mule skinners working to skin the mule. One starts at the head and works down, the other starts at the feet and works up.
As a former and very insightful boss of mine once noted, the legal profession of the US has become an industry in it's own right. It is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating all on it's own. There is nothing that you or I can do to combat this without radically changing our society.
Got a business plan there?
I think that the law prevents you from trademarking something that is aready in use, much like the case with the idiot who tried to trademark Linux.
Still, you are in better shape if you go the official route. There are trademark web sites that you can use to search for existing trademarks, and get information on how to register your own trademerk.
I'm glad to hear that it turned out this way. It's unfortunate that the initial splash of scandal gets widely publicized, but the resolution that the scandal was in fact libel never seems to get the same level of publicity.
I've long been an admirer of Sir Arthur's writings, especially the hilarious Tales from the White Hart, and the marvelous Childhood's End. Neither receive the publicity of his later 2001 and Rama related work, but in my opinion are far more interesting.
He was knighted after all? I thought that the flap over charges that he is a paedophile caused the British to withdraw the offer of knighthood. Does anyone have the story on this?